Barack Obama Quotes

There is much depressing evidence that the religious voice is required to stay out of the public square only when it is pressed in a conservative cause.

The problem is efforts by liberals to establish a wall between religion and society, in the guise of maintaining the wall between church and state.

If saying that religion should be a private matter and should not have special influence in public life is illiberal, then 74% of U.K. Christians are illiberal, too.

There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere.

Sometimes I think the environment in which we operate is entirely too secular. The fact that we have freedom of religion doesn't mean we need to try to have freedom from religion

I don't have an issue with what you do in the church, but I'm going to be up in your face if you're going to knock on my science classroom and tell me they've got to teach what you're teaching in your Sunday school. Because that's when we're going to fight.

It's time to resist efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union who have conducted a religious lobotomy on this country, seeking to strip it of any vestige of religious influence.

This issue is whether or not our government should be infusing religion into the public schools. Our churches are very strong in this nation and I think that's great and everybody should have the ability to worship as he or she sees fit. I choose to worship not believing in God and government should not thrust a religious idea down my throat.

Today courts wrongly interpret separation of church and state to mean that religion has no place in the public arena, or that morality derived from religion should not be permitted to shape our laws. Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression. Secularists want to empty the public square of religion and religious-based morality so they can monopolize the shared space of society with their own views. In the process they have made religious believers into second-class citizens.

One of the genuine phenomenons over the past four decades has been the liberal community's steadfast insistence that God should be barred from the public sphere. This is not law. It is religious prejudice.

Richard John Neuhaus, in his well-known book The Naked Public Square, tells us that in America, the public square has become openly hostile to religion.

I don't have an issue with what you do in the church but I'm going to be up in your face if you're going to knock on my science classroom and tell me I got to teach what you're teaching in your Sunday school. That's when we're going to fight... There's no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling the preacher 'that might not necessarily be true.' That's never happened. There are no scientists picketing out front of churches. There's been this coexistence forever, so to have religious communities knocking down the science door, there's something wrong there.

I sincerely believe that the collective efforts of many secularists during the past generation, resulting in the expulsion from our schools and from the public square, has left us vulnerable.

Religious doctrines do not and clearly cannot be adopted as the criminal code of a state.

Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternatives.

In our sensible zeal to keep religion from dominating our politics, we have created a political and legal culture that presses the religiously faithful to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and sometimes privately as well, as though their faith does not matter to them.

We will be a better country when each religious group can trust its members to obey the dictates of their own religious faith without assistance from the legal structure of the country.

Most people I know I think agree and even many theists agree with this. We don't want government involved. When atheists become the majority in this country, I don't think the theists are going to be glad to have "one nation under no God" inserted in the Pledge of Allegiance.

In Europe, the Enlightenment of the 18th century was seen as a battle against the desire of the Church to limit intellectual freedom, a battle against the Inquisition, a battle against religious censorship. And the victory of the Enlightenment in Europe was seen as pushing religion away from the center of power. In America, at the same time, the Enlightenment meant coming to a country where people were not going to persecute you by reason of your religion. So it meant a liberation into religion. In Europe, it was liberation out of religion.

When you see what has happened in America, driving religion, driving believers from the public square, there is a clear connection to the challenges we have in this country morally, economically, militarily. It goes back to pushing biblical values out of the public square.

No religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or practiced [in the elementary schools] inconsistent with the tenets of any religious sect or denomination.

To the ACLU, the First Amendment speaks more directly to freedom from religion than it does to freedom of religion.

Removing religious symbols from public places is not neutrality. On the contrary, it sends a highly negative message - that religion is something shameful, embarrassing, or at best strictly private.

We're a very religious country; the government's secular.

The equality that we are all entitled to, as citizens of this democracy, can't be avoided by some religious dogma of a President who's is supposed to believe in the notion of separation of church and state. And he frankly doesn't.